Pierre Boulez's Pli selon Pli An achievement may also be an impasse. In 1955, the year he turned 30, Boulez completed Le Marteau sans maître: it was his breakthrough piece, but for him it was more an ending. It pushed musical organization to an extreme. With its short movements, it left the problem of large-scale form waiting. And its composition coincided with the dissolving of the unanimity with which he and his young colleagues had been speaking at the start of the 50s. In the new atmosphereless compelled, more reflective, more individualhe turned from the abrupt word-spates of René Char, an elder contemporary, to the finely shaped enigmas of Stéphane Mallarmé, last of the great 19th-century French poets. This was a turn, too, from construction to improvisationprecisely, in the first place, to two "improvisations on Mallarmé" that Boulez wrote in 1957 while beginning two instrumental projects: his Third Piano Sonata and the second book of Structures for two pianos. Both these works also have their Mallarméan aspects. In particular, Boulez was excited by the recent publication of the poet's notes and drafts for a "Book" of manifold mutability, a collection of leaves and dossiers that could be read in innumerable waysa labyrinth of words. This notion of form seemed to answer the needs of the new serial music as Boulez saw them. Tonal music had been defined by a gravitational kind of harmony, and therefore by linear form, urging towards the final cadence. Serial music, by contrast, was "a universe in perpetual expansion". There was no endpoint, nothing to limit how and where the music took its course. A course that was in fact limitlessa structure allowing many different orderings of eventsmight therefore provide a new homogeneity between material (especially harmonic material) and form. To endlessness, though, there is no ending. Structures II, including numerous segments that can be differently placed according to the players' choices and signals, was not so much finished as abandoned in 1961, and the Third Sonata, after nearly half a century, remains a work in progress. As for the two Improvisations sur Mallarmé, though they may have originated as quick homages to the writer who meant most to Boulez at the time, they gave rise to an elaborate work, Pli selon pli, that did not reach its definitive shape until 1989a work that unveils fold by fold, pleat by pleat (the title comes from a Mallarmé poem other than those set in the work), what Boulez has called a "portrait of Mallarmé". The first two Improvisations were scored for soprano with a percussion ensemble emphasizing tuned and metal instruments, an ensemble appropriate to the white, bright, scintillant imagery of the poems. A swan on a frozen lake, white on white, is struggling to get airborne; its plumage is also the poet's pen (plume), unable to reach the deep ice of the unformed that is the imagination. Yet a poetic act is happening even while it is being disavowed: the swan becomes the Swan. The second sonnet maintains the two colours, white and transparent, as well as the sense of a frustration, creative and sexual, that is also a birth. Boulez responds to all this not only in his music's lustre but in having his vocal lines bounce among fixed pitches, in retrieving fragments from his own birth as an artist (extracts from his Notations of 1945, scored to make interludes in the first Improvisation) and in recreating the poetic structures. In the first Improvisation the four parts of the sonnet are clearly distinguished; in the second there is a contrast, gradually eroded, between syllabic writing in long notes and ornate garlands of melody. In 1959 Boulez added a third Improvisation, in which the replacement of verbal structure by musical goes so far that the words are soon lost, drowned in the "tomblike shipwreck" this third sonnet evokes. Again the drownings are several. The first word of the text, vastly drawn out, emerges as pure melodic flight; elsewhere the dialogue of line, image, metre and rhyme becomes an exchange between musical groupings, especially of xylophones and harps. The ensemble is larger, and initially Boulez allowed multiple options: alternative stretches from which to choose, different ways of ordering them. The third Improvisation is also different in that its subject is not birth but death, and Boulez went on in that direction in a new movement, Tombeau, also performed for the first time in 1959 and for an even larger formation: a medium-scale orchestra, but with percussion still to the fore. The poem here, a monument to Poe, is once more a sonnet, but now virtually all of it is effaced. The mood, too, is changed. Whatever changes may overcome artistic consciousness and musical style, death is a finality that remains constant, and Tombeau is a new approach to linear form: it is music that rolls on like a rock, gathering onto and into itself musical ensembles and materials, speeding up, complexifying itself, until at last, in a magnificent reinvention of the final cadence, it conjures up words, the voice and an obbligato horn (the "trump of no worth", perhaps, from the preceding poem). Boulez's next step was to extend this linearity backwards. Reaching towards a moment of death, the work would spring from an instant of birthDon, starting with the first line of a poem ('Don du poème", in which Mallarmé pointed towards the subject matter and metre of his "Hérodïade"), where Tombeau had ended with the last. Now with five movements, Pli selon pli was heard for the first time in 1960, and it was linear, too, in its gradual accumulation: Don was a piano piece with soprano (not only singing the incipit but presaging the three Improvisations), followed by progressive enlargement. However, Boulez changed this plan for one of gradual diminution and accumulation, by writing a new orchestral Don and arranging the first Improvisation for larger forces on the scale of the third. That was how the work stood from 1962 for 20 years, through its first two recordings. Then, in the eighties, Boulez came back to it. The 1962 Don had left room for different manoeuvrings of musical sections in its latter part; in 1982 these were eliminated. Similarly, in 1989 Boulez completed a revision of the third Improvisation in which orderings were determined, but without damage to the work's fluidity. After all, what is fixed in music is only on the page. The ear, with no access to the future, can stilland constantlybe taken by surprise, seduced by the next flap of the swan's wing, the next shiver of the lace curtain, the next surge of foam between those ultimate points of birth and death. Paul Griffiths

next   back to insights overview